“I hope,” Peter said. “No word from the mountain? Nothing from Jan-Mark? Nothing from Tish?”
“Not a peep.”
Peter came all the way into the newsroom and shut the door behind him. The windows that fronted the street on this level were mullioned, but the mullions were new and modern and large. Peter could see the short paved stretch of Main Street that ended at the gazebo and the town park. The windows of the stores were full of evergreen branches with twinkly little lights implanted in them. People came to see a six-day-long Nativity play, but when they weren’t watching it they wanted their Christmas American Traditional. Over on Mott Street, Jean and Robert Mulvaney had turned their little dry-goods store into Santa’s Workshop and ordered a stack of toys to sell to outlanders with too much money and not a lot of sense.
“I don’t know,” Peter said. “It’s been much too quiet. Don’t you think it’s been much too quiet?”
“I think I’ve got much too much work to do to worry about whether it’s been much too quiet.”
“I don’t know.” Peter sighed. “It’s opening day. Every year before opening day, we have a crisis. Where’s the crisis?”
“Maybe Dinah Ketchum will finally shoot that daughter-in-law of hers dead, and we can all get ready to listen to another lecture from Montpelier about how we have to bring Vermont into the twentieth century. Are you going to let me get back to work?”
“Sure.”
“You ought to do something yourself,” Amanda said. “At least look like you’re doing something. If you don’t, Timmy Hall is going to come up and give you five awful ideas for the paper.”
Timmy Hall was nowhere to be seen, which was par for the course for Timmy. Their copy boy always seemed to be either underfoot or invisible. He always left Peter wondering how old he really was.
Peter shook that out of his head, watched Amanda go back to her desk and turned to look back out at Main Street again. He was being an old Nelly, of course, but he couldn’t really help himself. Small towns like this were full of people whose deepest wish was to have a television camera aimed at them. There would be a lot of television cameras on hand for the opening of the Celebration, and the nuts should have come out of the trees by now. So where were they?
Peter considered the possibility that this year there would be no nuts at all, and no trouble, either, and dismissed it out of hand. He had been around the world and back. He had been born and brought up in this very town. He knew better.
He decided to take his mind off it by looking at the mock-up for the front page, which was always news from Away and always amusing. It was a front page he was particularly proud of, because it had everything—as far as Bethlehem, Vermont, was concerned. In the first place, it was about violence in the flatlands, which allowed the citizens of Bethlehem to congratulate themselves on how intelligent they had been to stick around here. In the second place, it was violence with style and a kind of Agatha Christie twist, which made it fun to read. There was even a picture, a great big smudged-looking thing of a thick tall man with a Middle Eastern solemnity to his face. The headline read:
HIGH SEAS MYSTERY: DEMARKIAN NABS
MURDERER ON BILLIONAIRE’S BOAT
Then there was a subhead, one he’d written himself:
THE ARMENIAN-AMERICAN HERCULE POIROT
SOLVES ANOTHER ONE
It was too good to be true.
It was so good, in fact, that Peter Callisher used it as one more proof positive that a disaster was about to befall them.
2
Tisha Verek had been the wife of a notorious man long enough to know how to behave, and on this morning of December second—with a thin mist of snow falling on the barren ground of her summer garden and the half-light of a cloud-occluded dawn making all the world look gray—she was behaving herself with a vengeance. It was eight o’clock in the morning, much too early to get anything done in New York—but this was not New York. This was Bethlehem, Vermont, where Tisha and her husband Jan-Mark had moved five years before, during one of Jan-Mark’s counterphobic fits. Tisha often had trouble believing that Jan-Mark was really here, in Vermont, in the country, and that he hadn’t vanished into smoke as soon as the carbon dioxide began to thin in the air. Jan-Mark was that quintessential urban invention, the contemporary artist. He smoked too much, drank too much, swore too much and snorted too much cocaine. He hand-stretched custom canvases to forty feet in length and pasted them over with twice-washed trash. He painted red-and-black acrylic swirls on conventional four-by-eights and called the results “Cunnilingus.” Most of all, he met other men like himself, and women, too, in heavy-metal bars where the air was thick with marijuana smoke. Back in the city, all but one of his friends had AIDS. The one had made a vow to Buddha in 1972 and lived in an apartment filled with joss sticks and chimes.